One Straw Revolution Masanobu Fukuoka Larry Korn One-Straw Revolutionary Interviews Videos Articles Reviews Photo Galleries Calendar Masanobu Fukuoka Contact Information Masanobu Fukuoka (1913-2008) Larry Korn Masanobu Fukuoka, the Japanese 465 Taylor Street farmer/philosopher from Shikoku Island, and Ashland, OR 97520 author of The One-Straw Revolution, passed away on August 16, 2008 at the age of 95. [email protected] He continued to farm and give lectures until just a few years before his death. He had Connect with Larry Korn been in poor health since October 2007, and on Facebook. in August of 2008 he asked his doctor to discontinue treatment. He passed away peacefully at his home a week later during the Obon festival. Obon, after New Years, is the most important Japanese holiday. It is when the ancestors come back to earth for three days to visit the living. It is a happy time. Villagers tend to the graves, families relax, visit and reminisce as children play together in the summer sun. On the evening of the third night the ancestors go back with a sendof of songs and fireworks. Fukuoka-sensei died on the third day of Obon. In 1988, Masanobu Fukuoka received The 1988 Ramon Magsaysay Award For Public Service. The following biography is excerpted from the award presentation on August 31, 1988 in Manila, Philippines: Masanobu Fukuoka was born on the Japanese island of Shikoku on 2 February 1913. Iyo, his birthplace, is a small town on the west coast, sixteen miles from the city of Matsuyama. His family had been settled there for hundreds of years. On Iyo's hillsides overlooking Matsuyama, his father, Kameichi Fukuoka, cultivated mandarin oranges (tangerines). These orchards, combined with extensive rice lands below, made Kameichi the largest landowner in the area. Kameichi was an educated man, having completed eight years of schooling, which was exceptional for his day. Repeatedly the local leaders selected him mayor. Fukuoka’s mother, Sachie Isshiki, was of Samurai descent and also well-educated. She was gentle, whereas his father was strict and permitted no luxuries in the household. Even so, Fukuoka remembers a childhood of ease. Tenants tilled the family rice lands. As the second child of six and eldest son, his only chore was to gather wood after school each day. The family was Buddhist but was tolerant toward Christianity, which had penetrated the Iyo region long before; as a boy Fukuoka was accustomed to seeing Christian symbols incorporated into household Shinto shrines. Years later, he would send two of his daughters to missionary schools. Fukuoka’s own education began in Iyo's local elementary school, but for middle and high school he had to travel to Matsuyama. Thus, for many years he rode his bicycle daily to Iyo Station, took the train to the city, and went the rest of the way on foot — about half an hour's walk. He claims to have been an inferior student who infuriated his teachers. (One day, in a rage over his misbehavior, the music teacher slammed down the top of the village's only organ so hard that it broke.) Although lessons did not interest him, the boy was impressed by the advice of his literature teacher who urged each student to make five fast friends during his lifetime so that there would be five people to weep for him when he died. As it was expected that Fukuoka would inherit the family farm, his father sent him for higher education to Gifu Agricultural College, near Nagoya, on the main island of Honshu. Gifu was a three-year state college where students learned modern techniques for largescale farming. Once again, Fukuoka was an indiferent student who preferred to spend his time horseback riding and "fooling around"; student life was generally idyllic and irresponsible. However, a feeling of impending crisis swept the school in 1932 when Japan annexed Manchuria. Fukuoka and his fellow students detested the intensified military training they were now obliged to undergo. At Gifu, Fukuoka specialized in plant pathology under the eminent Professor Makoto Hiura. He found good company among the students who gathered in Hiura's ofce to help with the professor's research and to chat. As jobs were scarce when Fukuoka graduated in 1933, Hiura persuaded him to continue his research at Okayama Prefecture Agricultural Experiment Station. The following year Hiura found him a position in the Yokohama Customs Ofce, where he was assigned to the Plant Inspection Section. In its laboratory perched on top of a hill overlooking the city's port, Fukuoka studied diseases, fungi, and pests found on imported fruits and plants, spending his time, as he later recalled, "in amazement at the world of nature revealed through the eyepiece of the microscope." Every three days he took his turn inspecting incoming plants directly. During his time of, he enjoyed the life of the town and "fell in and out of love" several times. In his third year at Yokohama, however, he was struck down by acute pneumonia, or incipient tuberculosis. Hospitalized, he was subjected to wintry-cold air as part of his treatment. His friends avoided him, fearing contagion. Even the nurses fled after taking his temperature because the room was so cold. Sick and lonely, Fukuoka feared for his life. He was twenty-five. When he finally recovered and returned to work, Fukuoka remained distracted by his harrowing brush with death and he began brooding obsessively about life and what it was meant to be. One night during a long solitary walk on the hill overlooking Yokohama he approached the edge of a clif. Looking down, he wondered what would happen if he fell from the clif and died. Surely his mother would cry for him, but who else? Overcome by realization of his failure to acquire five true friends, he collapsed into a deep sleep at the foot of an elm tree. He awoke at dawn to the cry of a heron. He watched the sun break through the morning mist. Birds sang. At this moment Fukuoka had a revelation: "In this world there is nothing at all." There was no reason to worry about life. As he wrote later, he suddenly understood that "all the concepts to which he had been clinging were empty fabrications. All his agonies disappeared like dreams and illusions, a something one might call 'true nature' stood revealed." Fukuoka embarked immediately upon a new life. The next day quit his job and set of gaily on an aimless journey. He wandered the sea, to Tokyo, to Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto, and finally to the southern island of Kyushu. For months — he himself doesn't know how many — he lived on his severance pay and the generosity of others he jubilantly broadcast his newfound belief that "everything is meaningless." But people dismissed him as an eccentric and he fine went home and retreated to a simple hut on the mountainside. He entrusted with his father's richly-bearing citrus grove, he beg putting his revelation to a practical test — by doing nothing! Convinced that everything should be allowed to take its natural course, Fukuoka left the meticulously pruned fruit trees to nature. He then watched as insects attacked, branches interlocked, and orchard began withering away. His father's decimated grove provided Fukuoka his first important lesson in natural farming: you cannot change agricultural techniques abruptly — trees that have been cultivated cannot adapt to neglect. In 1939, Japan's deepening involvement in military expansion abroad interrupted Fukuoka’s rustic existence. Besides the fact his parents' concern over his odd behavior, it was no longer considered appropriate for the son of the mayor to be "hiding" in the hills. About the same time, he was ofered the post of chief of the Disease and Insect Control Section of the Kochi Prefecture Agricultural Experiment Station. Acceding to his father's wishes, he accepted. He moved to remote Kochi, on the other side of Shikoku Island, a remained there for the next five years. At Kochi, Fukuoka and his colleagues were expected to increase wartime food production, especially through advances in scientific agriculture. While concentrating on research, Fukuoka also advised farmers about chemical farming and wrote a "farming tips" column for a local newspaper. On his own, however, he conducted comparative studies. He compared yields from intensively cultivated crops enhanced with compost and chemical fertilizers and pesticides those achieved from crops grown without chemical additives. His conclusion was that the use of fertilizers and pesticides was not really necessary. Although these additives resulted in a marginally higher yield, the value of the yield did not exceed the cost of achieving. Thus, at Kochi Fukuoka established to his satisfaction the superiority of natural farming over farming with chemical aids. Building upon his earlier revelation that "doing nothing was best," these studies laid the scientific basis for his lifework. During holidays from the research station, Fukuoka visited his family in Iyo. On one of these visits in the winter of 1940, a local matchmaker introduced him to six young women, one of whom, Ayako Higuchi, pleased him and agreed to be his wife. They were married in the spring. The first of their five children, daughter Masumi, was born the following year, to be followed in due course by a son, Masato, and three more daughters, Mizue, Mariko, and Misora. At Kochi, far from home and the battlefields, Fukuoka philosophically pondered the problems of war and peace. At one point, he drafted his ideas in a letter to the president of the United States. He cannot remember whether he mailed it.